


The West End

by fluorescentgrey



Category: British Writer RPF, Historical RPF, The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Camping, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Seattle, Tent Sex, Volcanoes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-13
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 05:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2610134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean a step before me in this unreal gray greenhouse neighborhood paused and turned to me and my mouth dried up like the dammed Elwha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The West End

I.

The first of april, rain… Jean holding a fistful of lavender sprigs walked halfway across Cal Anderson park before he saw me and waved with the flowers held aloft like a torch or a surrender flag gray-purple and fragmenting like the sky… I was stoned thinking about the Doors’ “The End” in Apocalypse Now. We walked to Goodwill, lavender fragrant in the breeze, the smell of that neighborhood like rain and vanilla and dusk and pot smoke and pho spices, the foothills of the mountain flanking up past the postindustrial infinity that unfolded down Boren, clouds obscuring the summit. Jean bought a bunch of Vietnamese psych cassettes and a road map of Southern Utah and a cast-iron skillet. Outside it was raining again and on the hill above Dearborn the rhododendrons were blooming, lavender and rosemary, a hanging cache of lilac, a spray of white and blue hyacinths behind the fence of someone’s gated yard. Jean a step before me in this unreal gray greenhouse neighborhood paused and turned to me and my mouth dried up like the dammed Elwha…

Sometimes in Seattle I get convinced the world ends at the shore of the sound in a gray mist wall of varying thickness that floats out on the water and becomes impermeable somewhere. You could get cast up and wrecked against it like flotsam against the great frosted bell jar of the world. Somewhere there’s a door in it that opens onto another place but I’m not interested in going through the door. In the winter Jean and I drove to Bellingham in the pouring rain and drove until the road ended in gravel and a barbed-wire fence and a spreading brown salt-marshland that seemed to conceal meaninglessness itself. Down a gated jetty were all these tankers tethered and knocking in the fog and the wind and the waves had driven in logs that were stripped bare of bark… somewhere, the ringing of a low bell. The slap of wet rope. Jean with his narrow shoulders drawn up in the cold looking out hollowly at the drowned world. A long time ago I took the ferry to Victoria for no reason and the boat seemed motionless in the fog at some seemingly critical juncture midway across the strait. Maybe I did go through the door then and if I did I am not sure if I ever came back, but who can tell you?

\--

II.

I had a dream they dealt my tarot in a bar in a town like Mazama at the edge of the mountains where the state flattens out into these bare and rolling brown hills like skin, like flannel sheets, the long dammed rivers glowing silver in the faint sun like dropped necklaces. Migrant workers’ camps. White sky, apple trees, ruined things in anonymous tangles. Jean asleep a long time ago in the passenger seat unshowered with ashy campfire hands… And to the south, the ruined nuclear city I still have never been to. The eternal and insistent rise of the mountain. The unreal city, somewhere, in the hollow valley scooped out here, at the end of the continent, as though with a melon baller, the land scored away and thrown elsewhere. Anyway they read my tarot in this bar while the jukebox played “All Apologies” – they were a tall and golden-haired girl who drank a bloody mary that never went dry, a guy in red flannel with the sleeves shorn – she dealt water signs I’d never seen, a tower struck by lightning, a card that bore the approximated image of the mountain vomiting neon fire, a towering thunderstormish plume of smoke like the death bird’s mating display… Someone like and unlike Jean tended bar, smelling like lavender and ash and saltwater, reading upside-down the metaphysical certainty of all my horrors unimaginable. Met my eyes, his opaque and white and cold as pearls, with a kind of grim resignedness, as though he knew the horror would befall him and I would be only the watcher, in the end, jetsam against the encasement of the universe, the man who walks through the Palouse not stirring the wheat… “Last call,” he said; I lit a cigarette; I woke up in bed in the house on 20th av in which I was living at the time in an attic room with a single window that cast gray predawn in shakily across the floor, scattered with torn magazines, coverless books, bargain vinyl, the hissing nothing sound of the draft under the door – and Jean still asleep there with his long body like the eastern hills, as though there were bone beneath all of them that cast their form, as though they rose still and fell while the earth breathed fire through its various mouths.

\--

III.

The clouds unbraided the rain from the sky and Jean drove the terraced and switchbacked road around the low and tight green water nested in the canyons. The mountains cut the sky like stone knives through the fabric of the world, glacier-tipped and generating the slow crawl soundwards of the milky water, the lifeblood that rounds and smoothes everything… in the blackening dusk Jean walked before me down the empty road flanked with evergreens that rose each like a tall soldier willed to motionlessness. We packed a bowl and smoked it on the shore of the lake as it lapped at our shoes and the fog crawled like a child in and around, dragging its soft white wall behind it. Jean fell asleep and I wrote for hours on my phone some long eulogistic nonsense for nothing in particular that was not yet dead. In the mountains you feel free. Nostalgia for an era I had never lived but an era as millennial as this one. I woke up still high at dawn; Jean was awake and red-eyed watching me as though through a window, “What were you writing last night, Tom?” I didn’t remember… I had this violent premonition that he would reach for me and then he did, his skin fever-hot, his ashy hands, as though he could crawl inside me and suss it out. The fire inside shoving at the exterior manifestation; I thought, this will end with the earth scorched… I thought of the man who stood at the base of Saint Helens and photographed the ash cloud as it advanced, unmoving himself because he knew he would die. The cars they found buried in the soft gray interior substance of everything, in the dust that lies at the heart of the world. People love, they love, they keep dying loving that which will destroy them; they keep wanting to burn, they keep looking for pleasure in burning… Jean holding one of my wrists above my head, the dew through the tent in my fingers, lifeblood. Rainshadow through the trees. Silence – near silence, Jean’s fingers knit with mine, the pain that seized his face, shadow moving quickly on the dead land, the hitched and shattering sound of his breath – my breath, hocketing, the free hand spread over my collarbone, my neck, the fingers that curled round my shoulder, and the rain unbraiding from the sky, and the shore of the lake rising, and the water clattering white amongst the stones, and Jean who said “Tom – ” and whose head fell back and whose neck was long and white like whalebone, like spume, like a surrender flag… On the way into Mazama the car was running on fumes and I coasted the downhills thinking of Jean naked, rain, the light against his skin through dappled fabric, though he sat next to me looking very unexotic, dressed, hair a wet and fucked-looking mess, feet on the dashboard, knees swaying. The radio played the Clash’s “London Calling;” I have no fear, I live by the river… There is a coffee shop and gas station in Mazama on the west end of the only road and I watched Jean fill the tank through the front window, wearing my inside-out sweater, and I remembered that on the peninsula the water runs tannin red out to sea at Cape Alava in a bloody menstrual way, as though it would hiss and blacken like lava when the seawater touched it, the eagles screaming, a whale carcass somewhere, the air like graveyards, itself a graveyard.

\--

IV.

The mountain Mazama is named after is far to the south. In a bygone and violent era it destroyed itself and is full of water now so deep that it consumes light. Only death is in there. There’s another universe where I died and he lives and I am looking for that door. I do not know yet where it is.

\--

V.

At the end there will be no water and I will die grateful for the vaporization of the sound… There is a billboard in Wallingford and another in Belltown that says “Do you have a plan?” Do you have a plan when they wake up? As though it would matter, within the larger plan… In the early morning on Friday the thirteenth my roommate put her teapot on and forgot about it and the paint melted and congealed again on the stovetop like fake snow and all the water was gone as though it had never been. I thought of Jean when my alarm went off at ten; I went to Goodwill and bought a new teapot and some Vietnamese psych cassettes and listened that night in the dark while the spring came in three isolate thundercracks like the shattering of glass and the rain followed, s i n g i n g

**Author's Note:**

> "je voudrais tellement que tu serais avec moi"
> 
> i have a zine version on sale over here if you dig: http://rainwatercp.bigcartel.com


End file.
